Otherwise I would have suggested to do a community vote on the best game.

I wonder wether they now pull all WebStart entries into some machines cache. Otherwise theres the risk that people continue working on their things.....(being a true, honorable knight ... I never ever wouldn't do that of course)

Browsing though the list this morning, I was shocked to see that about 90% of the folders were actually empty! Not a sausage! I wonder if that was due to uploading difficulties or simply not producing a game in time?

I did a rough guess of about 250 entrants, however, it looked to me like about 1/3 of the folders I looked at had something in them (it was pretty slow so I didn't look at many). Of the few folders I did look at, there seemed to be a fair number of them with more than one game submitted, not a big surprise since most of the entries probably already existed before the contest was announced. I'm looking forward to checking out the games that do win though, some of the work I've seen in the forums impresses me a lot (mainly because it's usually posted with the words... well I was bored on my 15 minute lunch break at work, so I wrote this shader program that gets 90 fps on my old atari 2600, it's not perfect though because I couldn't get it to compensate for the screen burnin on my old c64 monitor, but it does compensate for glare from up to 9 seperate light sources that could be affecting the monitor, oh yeah, and it only works with quake3, the leaked halflife 2 files, and apogies commander keen files, support for pong shading and ms pacman deluxe planned for a future lunch break...)....

Personally, I don't expect survivor to be in the top 5, let alone top 3. It was too unpolished by the deadline to have much chance, I think, against the other things that people had been working on more consistently for longer. HG/SE was a lot more polished and that was done in a similar timeframe, so...

EDIT: including - in particular - the fact that our sound effects sucked. And in fact the whole sound subsystem is broken on linux (after you've fired about 20 shots it switches itself off on my machine). Although these things only take a little amount of time to bring up to a good level, we had to prioritise and get things like e.g. the AI + monsters working well and fast enough instead...

Alien Flux is slightly more technically impressive than Wurm, which I find somewhat underwhelming (sorry guys ) Must be the Swing gui stuff in it...

I found seemless integration of Swing techincally impressive! Like it VERY much!

Wurm is multiplayer. Multiplayer is always difficult, many many constraints, difficult flows, nasty artifacts, lots of precautions to be taken, requires clean architecture. That's what I was talking about.

The coolest thing about Wurm, for me, has been the obsessive community that has grown up around it. Consistantly find 50-70 people playing it and people strating to form their own towns, farms, etc. Very context rich (like Morrowind).

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